Off your Facebook, it’s strictly private

Facebook has long been the devil you know, a place filled with friends that you can never leave despite constant breaches of privacy. But could Google’s new alternative finally break the social network monopoly, or is it just as bad?

It was the end of June when invitations to a new website called “The Google+ Project" hit inboxes around the world. Those who joined were promised all the best features Facebook offered and more privacy than it ever could.

People who logged in found a beautifully artistic and clean system that was easy to deal with.

If you want to keep things away from your boss or family, it’s simply a matter of messaging the right circle. The privacy policy is almost six times shorter than Facebook’s 6000-word tome and uses language that is much easier to understand.

Despite starting as an invitation-only network less than a month ago, Google+ has already gathered more than 10 million people sharing over 1 billion photos, blogs and links every single day.

When Facebook sneaked its facial recognition system into the photos of more than 750 million users without permission, it was the latest of many privacy breaches and some saw it as the last straw.

Sarah Stokely, communications expert from the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, says she’d been hunting for a Facebook replacement because she was sick of having features lumped onto her.

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“Privacy is a real concern of mine in social networking and the way you control it on Facebook seems to be constantly changing," she says.

“I decided I had to delete all my professional contacts from it and just have my personal friends and family, to make sure my privacy was protected. Google has also set up a way for me to easily export and delete my personal data."

Freelance writer Matthew Clayfield describes himself as a tech-savvy geek who is excited by Google+ as a viable alternative and says he’s looking to join the throngs leaving Facebook because of privacy concerns.

“While I don’t particularly like the idea of Google having access to both my social networking data and my email account, I prefer its official stance on privacy more than I do Mark Zuckerberg’s," he says.

“A key reason I have embraced Google+ is to have some modicum of control over how much privacy I retain and how much I relinquish."

But Clayfield, who is also a heavy user of Google’s email system, admits the vast majority of his contacts have not defected with him and says he still uses his Facebook account.

“I expect that it will pick up and am doubling down on [consolidating] my commitment to the site . . . in an effort to get people I know to join up and to convince those who have that it’s not as quiet as it may seem," he says.

Emptiness is the ultimate enemy of social networking and a lack of community has killed off many would-be competitors to Facebook. MySpace is a shell of its former self and Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces service was a ghost town before it was put down in March.

Ben Howse, who tests computer games, was initially excited by the idea of being a Google+ tester. But once he entered he found more of the same and soon abandoned his account.

“I’ve got a single friend on Google+ and it’s lacking the people because it’s pretty much the same thing as Facebook," he says. “Right now it just feels like a test website full of dummy data."

Howse has plenty of experience on the bleeding edge (where technology is so new it can be risky) of social networking and was one of the first Australians to join Facebook in 2006. But he says loyalty has nothing to do with his decision to stay and that privacy issues are important to him.

“All the technology writers were saying Google+ was Facebook with privacy done correctly," he says. “But it had a privacy issue on its second day and it turned out they didn’t have all the holes fixed.

“This is Google and the internet is what they do so if they can screw it up this fast I’m not about to jump ship to a rebranded Facebook."

Google chief economist Hal Varian is also straightforward about how the search giant plans to sift through reams of user messages, photos and other data in an effort to make ads more successful.

“For example, people search for politicians . . . all the time but you don’t know what they think about them," he said.

“If you can see their blog or their home page then you can pull out information about sentiment and that’s a very hot topic.

“If you have the largest social network it’s probably going to be the most representative."

A Google Australia spokesman says, when asked about privacy concerns, that the service is still a limited “field trial" and there are no immediate plans to use the data from Google+ for marketing purposes – but refuses to rule it out.

The company has a choppy track record when it comes to rolling out systems. While its search engine, mapping system and Gmail services are online hits, the predecessor for Google+ was a bust, as was its collaboration tool Google Wave.

But the bottom line is this has become a battle of internet titans fighting for the lucrative birth, death and marriage details of every human on the worldwide web, and Facebook is taking the Google threat more seriously than it ever has before.

One software developer placed an ad for his Google+ account on Facebook, which quickly disabled his account and sent a curt explanation claiming he’d violated their terms of use.

The move backfired and went viral, sending thousands of people to Google+ while providing much-needed publicity. Some Facebook watchers also claimed it suffered a 6 million user-drop in the number of US accounts in May.

Even though she knows the new social network is probably no better for her privacy, Stokely says it’s Facebook’s attitude and lack of transparency that has driven her away.

“If you use Gmail they already send you ads based on the contents of your emails," she says.

“But it’s something they’re quite open about – it has been much more transparent about how it will use my personal details.

“At least when I’m not comfortable about it they’ve given me a way to take my data with me."